He has shown work in many exhibitions in Berlin, Hamburg, etc... and exhibited internationally at museums and galleries in Italy, Sweden, and more. He is represented by Produzentengalerie in Hamburg, and BlainSouthern in London.

[2]

The German painter Jonas Burgert paints a stage every time that he lifts his brush: with every stroke, with every composition. His works depict the inexhaustible theatre play that Burgert considers to be human existence: man’s need to make sense of his purpose in life. It is a quest that seems inconclusive, but which opens doors to every sphere of reasoning, imagination and desire. Oversized canvases are crowded with fantastical figures of different proportions. Some are gigantic, others are as small as infants. There are monkeys and zebras, skeletons and harlequins, Amazons, children, sometimes the painter himself. The supernumerary play a gruesome game: walls disintegrate and floors open where Burgert reveals heaps of bodies or glowing liquid, people wear masks and costumes, war-like paint decorates some of the faces. And what is a carcass and what is alive if often unclear. An inexplicable darkness looms everywhere amidst Burgert’s work that reminds of the play between life and death in a Freudian sense: between libido and cessation.

[3]

References to Renaissance painting and Flemish masters like Hieronymus Bosch are apparent in Burgert’s work; Freud’s psychoanalytical theories come alive with imagery that recalls 20th century surrealism. And yet, contemporary pop culture is equally present: from works by Mike Kelly to movies by David Lynch, comic strips and the absurd logic of science fiction: the timeless uncanny dictates Burgert’s paintings. They are a fragmentation of scenes that the viewer thinks to recognize because they tap into the unconscious by combining styles of the past with a fiction of today. Contradictions fuse and become a heavily referential spectacle – slightly absurd, like a beautiful nightmare.

[4]

«I was very fanatical. My mother told me all the time, “You’re a bit too extreme. Be careful.” When I was young, I didn’t have this medium to work in. It was annoying for other people because I was always like, “Come on, let’s get to the deep sense of everything.” My friends at school said, “Oh my god, we want to play soccer.” It took a while to find my medium. But when I found it, I was really happy. I thought, “Finally I can put all this disaster into my paintings and there’s no longer any need to create it in real life.”»

[5]

«It seems to me that we are human beings that recognize ourselves without actually understanding ourselves. This leads to a grotesque situation: man’s battle with his own mirror image, struggling to define himself. The ongoing debate about our own existence results in an enormous need for an overreaching narrative, for a spiritual context. We cherish the hope of finding more than merely the sum of our individual parts. So, in our mind, we create existences as heroes, gods or clowns. They lead unbearably loud, malicious, cynical, witty or passionate lives, in wonderfully strange or terrible places. In my art, I merely try to paint the scene of this ongoing process of debate and negotiation, with all its peculiarities.»

[6]

«As an eighteen to twenty year old I used to read a lot. Then I suddenly stopped. I had so many stories and narratives in my head that literature tended to block me rather than to act as a positive inspiration. More than from literature, I gain my inspiration from the street, or from the bar of a corner pub! I feel it’s a place where the entire range of dramatic expression of an individual’s psychology can be observed: loneliness, hate, the desire to impress, revenge, addiction, excess! For me everything plays itself out directly before our eyes, and literature seems to be a detour rather than a direct route. So I draw my inspiration, creativity and energy to create especially from human relations and emotions. I am influenced by literature to the extent that my access to art always works through questioning existential topics that are echoed in [literary sources]. It is not so much the actual story or literature per se that interests me, but the fundamental human concerns and actions – love, hate, envy, jealousy, euphoria and fear – intrinsic to literature that contribute to my work. That’s perhaps why the observer may draw so many literary allusions and associations.»

[7]

«I don’t really make many sketches before I start painting. I am much too impatient for that. For me, the thoughts I entertain before I start painting are much more important than a sketch or any preliminary practical work. In fact, the thought activity is the most laborious and electrifying process of them all because it determines the painting and the composition of the whole at a theoretical level. As soon as that is completed, I simply start to paint. The basic composition is naturally decisive, especially in my large format paintings, so I start by painting spatial lines, the long diagonals and so on. And then I merely have to react artistically to these first steps. So there’s lots of room for spontaneity. I have never yet painted a picture whose final state resembled what I had previously thought out. Because at some point I notice that I was initially beguiled by an idea that subsequently proved to be insufficiently coherent, that was unsustainable and was really only a momentary gag. So I have to change it again. My work is an ongoing process of wrestling with the painting, a constant and lengthy conversation with it.»

[8]

«The bondages I'm interested in it because it's a very flexible form, and in a way very simple, and you can use it for a lot of contents. You can use it like a medicin, to bondage something, you can also fix something, you can communicate two people with having a bondage in between and so on, so I love these form.

(...)

Skulls and heads. Both. We all know that skulls exist and it's a kind of a symbol for the end of the human, you know. It's a part of the whole thing, but I don't want to celebrate it like a spooky thing. I just want to have it because it's there. You cannot say it's not there. It's there. It's a thing I use from time to time.

(...)

I like mannequins sometimes to have this thin line between a human you can see and the idea of a human you have. And so that's the reason why sometimes I mix it or sometimes I cut something, I don´t know, an arm which is not fitting to the person, you know. Isn't an absolute idea but sometimes it shows that there's more flexibility in it, than we think sometimes.

(...)

I like the intensity of colours because it's no so intellectual. It's a thing you feel, you know, it goes in your feeling. I love that. In the end if you leave the room here you cannot remember all the content, but if you have still the feeling of the paintings, then I'm totally OK, you know, that's what I like to you. The colors are transporting exactly this idea.

(...)

I like to have a fight on the painting because I think the audience can see it. I want to see the procedure of painting because it's becoming more deep and heavy, you know, I like it, and so that's the reason why I make a lot of layers and I destroy again and go over it, and destroy again, and go over it and then so it becomes more like the result of a struggle, and I like that.»

[9]

«...in my eyes art is one great story. The attempt to create art automatically implies the principle of telling stories. It is important though that this story is not only thought out or rationally followed up. The story must above all be deeply felt as well. Art can then re- invent its own language and thus its story anew each day; it can make assertions and reject them, re-assert them and reject them again. Naturally, art is a complete illusion and a lie, offering a promise we want to believe in. Because we realize this, I have always felt it stimulating as an artist that I can call things what I want and re-invent as I like: I can tell wild stories on the canvas and create figures as I imagine them and as I want them to look, I can exaggerate, abbreviate, aggrandise, cut down again in size, …»

[10]

«I can only get into what I’m doing if I’m really honest about it. It took me some years to be strong enough and self-confident enough, to be sensitive again. Then I started to paint these kinds of paintings. If I want to have a figure, I paint a figure. If I want to have a horse, I paint a horse. And if I want to have red, I paint red. I need to do it like this, otherwise I wouldn’t continue painting. I didn’t want to be a conceptual artist. I didn’t want to be somebody who has a factory with twenty people painting stripes. There are some good artists like that.»

[11]

«For me, art is not to decorate our life, it’s to make movement in the brain. In the best case, it’s a spiritual thing. A platform, maybe. Sometimes I see it as a stage on which we have these struggles. I think art is a very good place to think about things because there are no rules; there’s nobody saying, “You have to do it like this.” You can do everything in art and it’s okay, because people can always just say they don’t like it. It’s the only really free thing.»

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